Bad Day
by geekinthepink
Summary: LilyJames. Oneshot. Everyone has bad days, it's the people who help you through them that make them better.


**BAD DAY**

**By geekinthepink**

**Summary: Everyone has bad days, but it's the people who try and fix them that make them better.**

**Author's Note: After watching Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" music video, I was inspired and tweaked the story of the music video into a tiny little one shot that fit the purposes that I wanted to use them for.**

Lily Evans was never much of an artist. It was one of those things where you just doodled when you were bored, often one of those squiggle and line sorts of drawings with your own name scrawled in random places. Some people scribbled and doodled when they were bored, other did it as a way of expressing emotion, which was the form that Lily had taken to.

It was one of those days, the "wake up on the wrong side of the bed" kind where you want nothing more than to curl up in your bed and know that nothing can get you there. She had made a mental list of the things that had gone wrong today and as she reached double digits her nerves began to dwindle.

The list entailing:

The typical and rather clichéd late start to the morning.

Three lost buttons on her blouse due to the hurried dressing caused by being late.

Spilling jam all over said blouse at breakfast.

Forgetting her potions book for class

Leaving class she tripped over her own loose shoelace.

No more than ten insults coming from Potter's bum buddies (The Marauders? Could they have picked a more fitting name? The miscreants.)

Giving herself a paper cut in class today that caused uncomfortable bleeding.

Really, the list goes on.

Hence the doodling.

Doodling is one of those subconscious things where you don't even need to be paying attention and your hand will just dance across the paper purposefully, no matter what the canvas was. In a very uncharacteristic way, Lily's doodling came across the desk that she was sitting at in the library.

Textbooks were strewn around her in hopes of studying for the potions exam that was coming up in just a couple of days. In a way, she supposed that she was studying so ruthlessly for it to make up for the lack of a text book today. Parchment also aided in the clutter on the desk but with every sheet of parchment covered in Lily's somewhat messy scrawl, the desk was the only blank canvas that she had.

She hated messing with the table, however, no matter how ink covered it already was. She knew that a simple spell would rid of it easily but the fact that she would be tainting school property bothered her a little. It didn't stop the sketching of her quill though.

It started off simple, a park bench with no surroundings. Perhaps it would just be a landscape, she thought. But then it was the idea to draw someone actually sitting on that park bench that tweaked the whole idea. It was a self-portrait, she decided. A badly drawn, stick-figure self-portrait with no artistic ability shining through.

Hitting a road block she looked up from her desk to where she could see the window distantly behind a few bookshelves. In some planetary protest of her bad day the sun was shining, the birds were singing, the Head Girl was vomiting from all of the joy.

Looking back down at the picture on the desk Lily decided that if it wouldn't rain outside, then stick-figure Lily was going to be bashed by rain clouds. With a large cloud hanging over the park bench and water droplets falling down from said cloud, she felt a little better. Purposefully forgetting an umbrella, she smiled at her little drawing. Even if the day was going horribly, it was nice to vent with a quill and a library desk.

Closing the text books surrounding her, Lily packed up her belongings and decided to give it a rest for today. After all she had been accident free for nearly half an hour now, who knew when the next trip and fall would strike?

----------

Pulling his glasses off of his face, James rubbed at his eyes tiredly. It wasn't as late as it felt, but perhaps that was due to the fact that he had been trying to finish the Charms homework he had put off until the last minute. Frankly, he didn't care about wrist movements, wand flicks or anything that these people wished for him to learn in this lesson.

Flicking the book shut angrily, he leaned back in the wooden chair, trying to stretch his back out a little from being seated for so long. In doing so, he spotted what appeared to be an ink stain on the table that the closing of his book had unveiled. Leaning closer to the table he found a little stick figure drawing.

The irony of the whole picture was perhaps the fact that while the drawing obviously depicted a girl sitting upon the park bench, he knew how the girl felt. Having given up on pursuing Lily Evans any further right now, the rigorous training schedule of the Quidditch team, Head Boy duties, homework and having to prepare for lives outside of Hogwarts, James had felt the stress tack on to him. Today was especially bad as it was just one of those days. The put your foot in the wrong leg of your pants, loose your glasses, fall down the stairs to the common room types of day.

The rain pelted the girl in the drawing but James was tired of this feeling, he was ready to shake it off and move on to tomorrow, where the outlook was just a little brighter. Besides, if you dwelled on the bad stuff, it would only just depress you in the end. Smiling at the picture, he re-inked his quill before setting to work on his own addition to the picture – an umbrella.

----------

It was near closing time of the library when Lily realized that she had left one of her potions texts that she was studying from at her table. The librarian wasn't pleased that a few stragglers were still making their way in, and Lily smiled apologetically at the woman briefly, before hurrying to the table where she had been previously sitting.

The book was nowhere to found, a distressing note and another number that she could add to her list of things that had gone wrong today. She searched under the tables and under the chairs and stopped abruptly when she spotted something scribbled on the table. Her drawing was still there, in all of its ink glory but now another addition had been made to it. While the entire thing was still in black ink, the differences between her drawing skill and whoever made this addition were apparent.

While hers was broad even lines, the other person used short sketchy lines as if painting. Neither of them showed any artistic abilities, obviously just dabbling around, but it was the solitary umbrella that she knew she hadn't drawn, that caught her attention. Reaching into her book bag she pulled out her quill and inkpot, wishing she had a marker or ballpoint pen instead, and she continued to add on to her joint project with this mystery person.

By time she had completed her addition, the librarian was forcefully shooing people out the door and she had forgotten about her lost potions text.

----------

James noticed when he returned to the common room the night before that he had somehow picked up an extra potions book along with the charms books he had been using. Now that it was his free hour he decided to return the book back to the library and partly because he didn't have anything better to do.

The library was nearly empty when he entered it, just a few other people on their free hours catching up on work they might have missed. Unsure where to place the book he opted to just set it on the front counter for the librarian to sort. Curious to see if the drawing he had embellished the night before was still in tact, he walked over to the table and found that it had in fact survived.

Actually, it had changed as well.

In addition to the original scene and his added prop, there was now a lightning bolt emerging from the cloud over the poor girl's head. Now, if that wasn't enough damage to be done, to her right was a large tornado appearing to prepare to swoop down and take the bench and the girl out in one swipe.

Pulling out his quill and inkpot, James set out to make yet another addition, this time ignoring the building maelstrom that was building. No more weather remarks were needed as there was only one thing that he thought he could add to this to fix whatever this girl's problems were.

----------

After lunch, Lily decided to check the library for her missing potions textbook one last time in the library. The library was on her way to class and it wouldn't take but a moment to stop and see if her book had been mistakenly shelved with the rest of the textbooks. She was surprised to find that her book was sitting on the front desk, the librarian having recognized it as a student's textbook as opposed to one of her own.

Smiling at her luck, Lily took the book graciously and thanked the librarian for finding it. On her way out, something caught her eye. It appeared that ink was eating the table that she had doodled on carelessly yesterday and she stopped to take a closer look.

Beside her little self-portrait, sitting on her left, was a portrait of a boy and a large question mark. Taking this as a hint of who she had been playing this little game with the past couple of days she grinned and reached for her quill. Making one final addition to the picture she tweaked the question mark the boy had left beside his self-portrait into a heart.

Satisfied with her work, Lily placed her quill back in her book bag and took her potions book into her arms.

---------

James didn't even bother to stop into the library to see if his mystery girl had made the final addition to their drawing as he had caught her in the act. After lunch he had found Lily Evans smiling at the picture and pulling out her quill. He supposed it had made sense after all of the times she had fallen and made a mess of herself the day before.

Gathering up a semblance of a plan, he smirked to himself before running up to his dormitory, knowing that while he would probably be late to his next class, it would be worth it.

---------

It was in Transfiguration that it happened. The complexities of the spell casting were causing Lily to have a headache when the door opened and James Potter sauntered in. He was later than usual and appeared to be out of breath, obviously having run from wherever he had been held up at.

In the past couple of months since they had been forced to work together as Head Boy and Girl she had found herself to actually tolerate the boy, to grow fond of his company so when she frowned at him for his tardiness, it was all in the sake of teasing. She was surprised to find that he only grinned widely at her when she did so.

After a lecture, some house points taken away and a detention from McGonagall, James walked over to Lily and handed her a simple red umbrella.

With another impish grin he turned away and walked back to his seat to which he found his friends looking at him curiously. It was an odd token of love; but they would later find out that it was the one that brought Lily and James together for the second that the bell rang to end Transfiguration, Lily Evans walked up to her fellow Head and kissed him soundly on the lips, informing him that he'd better be there to hold the umbrella for her in the rain.


End file.
